A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [104]
‘Did you find that stuff we needed?’
Across the hall, Saul is still talking to Katharine, though she must have one ear listening in on what we are saying.
‘Yeah. I got it. It’s there.’
I nod in the direction of the briefcase. Fortner sets his own down beside it.
‘Nice goin’ .’
‘Come through and I’ll introduce you,’ Saul is saying, and he guides the three of us into the sitting-room.
I just float through the next half-hour, oblivious of the others, unable to concentrate on anything beyond the possibility of discovery by Saul. We are introduced to Dave, Saul’s friend from Spain, and Susannah, his girlfriend. They are the only other guests, which concerns me. Fortner’s absence, when it comes, would not be so noticeable in a larger crowd of people.
Dave is a squat thirtysomething, bald before his time, with a generous smile stitched below weak eyes. Susannah is also short, but pale and thin, with vanished tits and an Oxfam wardrobe. I distrust her immediately, and think of him as ineffectual. He has a slightly desperate way of looking at me, a craving to be friendly and affable. Saul pours us all a drink and a conversation develops between the five of them to which I make no contribution. The utter pointlessness of getting to know new people, given my present situation, is palpable. Smells of garlic and wine drift in from the kitchen, where Saul goes from time to time to check up on the food.
Towards eight o’clock, as we are standing up to go next door for dinner, Dave asks me how I know Saul.
‘Old school friends,’ I tell him. ‘From way back.’
‘Listen to him,’ Saul interjects loudly from across the room. ‘From way back. You never used to say that, Alec.’ He looks over at Katharine. ‘You two are turning him into an American. The other day on the phone he told me to have a nice day.’
‘Bullshit,’ I say, but the way this comes out it sounds angry and petulant. There’s a sudden embarrassed silence among us and Saul grimaces, a joke gone wrong.
‘All right, all right,’ he says, and his face fills with disappointment. He has been growing gradually more impatient with me in the last few months, knowing that something in our friendship has changed, but without any real knowledge as to why. I don’t telephone Saul as much as I used to; don’t, for example, have the time to send him jokes via e-mail. We haven’t been out for a drink, just the two of us, since Christmas of last year, and I have entirely lost track of his career, his girlfriends, his worries and concerns. This is how I imagined things would pan out, but now that something has gone wrong, the burden of secrecy feels suddenly overwhelming. With Kate gone, Saul is the one person I might trust to talk to about what happened this afternoon. I want to tell him the truth, I want to tell him exactly what is going on. This constant entanglement with bluff, double-bluff, second-guess and guile, is wearing. Any notion of trust or honour that I ever had has vanished: my life has become a wall of lies shored up against the possibility of capture. I cannot recall what it felt like just to sit around this flat in the old days, watching videos with Saul and pissing away our teens and twenties.
‘Telecommunications,’ Dave is saying, to no one else but me. We are sitting beside one another at the dining-room table, Katharine and Fortner at either end with Saul and Susannah on the opposite side.
‘What about them specifically?’
‘You know how they’re paying for the Internet and all the fibre optic networks?’
Has he been talking to me about this before now? Have I missed something? Have I just been nodding and mumbling at him, my mind drifted off elsewhere?
‘No. How?’
‘Answering machines.’
‘What do you mean, “answering machines”?’
Dave leans forward, plucks a napkin from his side plate and places it on his lap.
‘Before answer phones came along you just dialled a number and let it ring out, right? If somebody wasn’t in, you hung up and there was no charge for making the call. But all that’s changed now that everybody has an answering machine. Whenever you make a call it kicks